The Interview
by Konsui's Little Brother
Summary: A simple question, suppossed to start the interview with famous Harry Potter, but it spurned into a revealing tale about what truly happened during that last year at Hogwarts.


A/N: Yay! Another one-shot for Neville! Don't ask me where this came from, I don't know.

* * *

"Before we get to you, Mister Potter, I would like to interview Mister Neville. This way, there's more gratitude for what you've done." Patty Lattelle, reporter for the Daily Prophet, smiled at the small group in front of her. It was a group, yes, but she was originally sent to just interview Neville Longbottom and Harry Potter. The others were there to put in words every now and then in case on of the main boys forgot a detail.

"More gratitude? No offense, Miss Lattelle, but I think there's plenty of gratitude for Harry as is." Lavender Brown scoffed at the older woman. She understood what the reporter was going to try and do. Undermine the events that happened at Hogwarts so that Harry's fights would shine more. They were trying to re-earn their popularity by having an interview focusing around the Golden Boy.

Patty let a pleasent smile cross her face as she shifted in her seat to get a better look at the girl speaking to her. "Well you see Miss...Brown was it? You see, Miss Brown, this is just the way that I was told to conduct the interview. Not my idea. So please, take your complaints to a different person." Lavender huffed, arms crossed over her chest, and leaned back into her chair.

"Now, does any one mind if we start these interviews now?" Patty kept her voice overly cheerful, to match the smile plastered onto her face, as she looked over the batch of teenagers in front of her. This had not been what she was expecting when she was told to go out and get the 'biggest interview of the century' by her boss. Sure, interviewing the famous Harry Potter had been a part of her plans but the rest just seemed so...Unnesicary.

After sending a look, one of those calming looks that he'd become so known for, towards Lavender, Neville shifter his gaze onto the interviewer. He didn't really care that she was just there for Harry. It wasn't like he was out for attention. "Yes, ma'am. I'm ready when ever you'd like to start."

"Right." Nodding slightly, Patty pulled out her quill from her front-robe pocket and flipped open the notebook that she'd been holding. She preferred the small pieces of paper, already connected, to the traditional scrolls of the wizarding world. It just made keeping track of everything so much easier.

Flipping past the pages filled with questions for Harry, all of which she had thought up herself, she landed on one of the back pages. It had a few quickly scribbled out questions for Neville to answer on it; just enough that it would count as an interview.

"Let's start with this one shall we?" Choosing the one right at the top, no need to read through the rest yet, Patty settled herself back in the large plush chair she'd summoned. The rest of the occupants in the room were sitting in similar, though slightly smaller, versions of the same chair. "Tell me, what happened to the classes that the Carrows, direct followers of Voldemort, took over?"

"They were awful." Neville's voice shook, ever so slightly, as he steeled himself for the rest of the answer. He had never told anyone but Harry about what had truly happened inside of the walls of the castle that last year. He was pretty sure that the rest of the students hadn't either. It just...It hadn't been anything that they had wanted to speak about. "Alceto turned Muggle Studies into, well, it wasn't even a class anymore. We were just stuck sitting in there while she talked about how Muggles are like animals, filthy and stupid, and how they were the reason that us Wizards are in hiding. That they were restoring the natural order when they killed the Muggles."

He shook his head, bangs falling into his eyes, at the thought. It had been bad in that class but her brothers, Amycus's, had been so much worse. Just the topics that they had to learn, had to sit through, had to watch be acted out on their fellow students...It still made his stomache churn with hate and disgust. But just as he was opening his mouth to start speaking about him, Dean Thomas leaned foreward and stareted to speak instead.

"You should've heard Neville here when she said that. It was what got all of us going again, I think. His words." There was a prideful boasting in Dean's voice then, as though it had been his best-mate and not just Neville who had countered the Muggle-based insults that day.

"Really? And what did he say?" Patty raised one of her thing, blonde eyebrows at the scraggly looking boy. She hadn't actually expected there to be anything left out that the ones in the back, half of which names were still a mystery to her, would have to fill in.

"Asked her how much Muggle blood her and her brother had in them." Dean patted the brown-haired boy in front of him on the shoulder before retreating back into his own chair. "It was the first time anyone had actually stood up to either of the Carrows. Got us all rallied up when he did."

Light green eyes shifted towards the now thouroughly embarrased looking Longbottom. "Oh did he? And tell me...What made you say that to her face?"

"Well..." There was an awkward pause then, a moment where Neville just squirmed in his seat, before he met the light green gaze of the reporter. "We needed hope and that was all I could think of doing to help bring some."

Scribbling the response down on her notepad, and completely ignoring the fact that Neville had only spoken about one of the Carrows, Patty picked the last question on her list. The rest of them (how he found the Room Of Requierment, what had made him stay in Hogwarts, where his family was) didn't really seem that important. After all, people wanted to hear the gorey details of the fight, not the boring things that happened inside of the classrooms. The last question would just sum all of the others up into one and save ink. "Now, can you briefly tell me about the last year you spent in Hogwarts?"

And the majority of the interviewees stiffened. Worrid glances cast between, looks filled with thinly veiled fear, faces set in sick grimaces. Ron and Hermione, sitting in the chairs closest to Harry, seemed to perk up slightly at the question. They had never actually heard the stories about what happened in the stone-walls and, unlike the reported, they were actually curious to hear what Neville had to say.

"Last year..." He gulped, swallowing a lump in his throat that wasn't really there, and forced his fingers to unclench themselves from the sides of the chair. "It was worse than any of the papers reported. Everyone was terrified; even the teachers. No one went anywhere without at least two other people with them. Even the teachers were walking in groups. And no one ever, ever, left their dorms at night."

"The Carrows liked to play around with the Crucio Curse. A lot. It was how they liked to punish the students and, if Headmaster Snape wasn't around, it was what happened to you whenever they got bored. A few of us, from the D.A., started goading the Carrows when they targeted the youngest kids there. Sometiems the distraction was enough to let them hide and then we'd get away to but..." Neville's voice gave way there, a tremor running up his spine and through his body, and he had to stop for a few seconds. But then, voice quiet and steady, he was speaking again. "Usually we just ended up as substitutes for the littler ones."

Patty's quill stopped in its frantic scribbling, hand several inches above the paper, as her eyes slowly drifted up to look the Gryffindor boy in the face. Her eyes wide, no doubt mimiking the look of horror that had settled onto Hermione's face, she raked them over Neville's face; looking for some form of a lie hidden in his eyes.

Nevile, however, just shrugged slightly. "I can take a round or two of Crucio better than a first year can. And it wasn't just me! Dean and Seamus and the others, they all did it too. We were just trying to keep the rest of the students as safe as we could."

This time it was said Irish boy, Seamus Finnigan, that spoke up. "Don't listen to him, Miss Patty. He just doesn't want to take all the spot-light for himself. The truth is," And here he got a rather odd sparkle in his eyes, one that was sad and happy at the same time. "Neville was the one that started it. Amycus was after a first year named Robin Harth sometime during the start of the year. You could tell by the way he was walking up to her that he was in a mighty bad mood. Next thing I knew, Neville here was calling the brute over to him, taunting him into cursing himself instead of Robin. We all just followed his lead."

"So it was Mister Longbottom that started the 'trend' of using your own persons to distract the Carrows?" That hadn't been something Patty was expecting. Her curiousty piqued, she flipped to another empty page in her book and readied to write down more. The 'starter interview' was turning out to be far more interesting then she thought it would be.

Seamus snorted. "Neville was the one that started the whole rebbellion against them. If it wasn't for him standing up against everyone, the D.A. would've died off after Harry left. See, we were all just waiting around to be finished off at the beginning of the year. A bunch of us were wishing that we could just be finished off so we wouldn't have to deal with it any more."

The deep sadness that laced through Seamus' normally jovial voice was enough to bring even Harry, who had already heard the story once before, to rapt attention. "In the Dark Arts class, that's what it was after Amycus took it over, when someone in there was punished...We were made to use the Crucio curse on them ourselves. A lot of the times, Carrows would even use the Imperious curse on us just so we had to use it. But Neville never did."

Beside him, Neville was practically glowing with an embarressed blush. Seamus, however, was not done praising the flushing boy. "Back-talked Amycus, refused to do what they told him to, took more Crucio's then anyone else in the school! And he led the D.A. all on his own once Luna was taken and Ginny had to flee with her family. He let everyone in the school, Snape, the Carrows, the other students and the teachers, know that he was the one leading them. Did all he could to stand up to them."

Clapping the mousy-haired boy on the back, Seamus' grin grew a little brighter. "Brought us all out of the place, he did."

"Re-really! I was just doing what had to be done, not trying to get attention like this. It should be Harry that you're interviewing right now. Not me!" Neville shifted uncomfortably in his seat, clouded gaze shifting to the ground. "I just...I couldn't let them all die there. And when the Ginny and Luna weren't there anymore, well, I just wanted to make sure that everyone in the school had a fighting chance."

"Yeah. So because you wanted us to have a 'fighting chance', you set it up so that in the middle of dinner in Halloween a bunch of decorations would fall from the cieling?" Lavender roller her eyes, playfully nudging Neville in the shoulder. "That wasn't teaching us to fight. That was giving us all hope. A bit of cheer that we wouldn't have had otherwise. Don't be so embarrassed about getting attention, Neville."

Rubbing the spot on his shoulder where she had nudged him (his skin was rather sensitive after all of the jinxes cast on it), and only flushed more.

Patty blinked, trying to hide the astounded look on her face, by pulling up another question. "And...Can you tell me what happened near the end of the year?"

There was another hesitation from Neville, where he glanced around the room uncertaintly, before he nodded again. "I guess I was becoming too big of an issue for the Carrows. They sent someone, I don't remember his name but he worked in the Ministry, out to get my Gramms. They figured if they had her, they'd be able to control me. But she was more fight then they thought she would be and she ended up fleeing." There was unmistakebly joy in his voice then, that his grandmother had gotten away unharmed.

"And then the Carrows decided that they were just going to kill me. I...I didn't hear it myself though. Proffesor Sprout did and she told me during class one day. Said I had to get out of the school and go into hiding with the others. Then she tried to tell me where Ginny and her family had gone so i could go and stay with them but...I couldn't just leave everyone. I ended up hiding in the Room Of Requierment instead so that I could still teach anyone that wanted to learn." Neville's memories of that part of his life, readying to fight everytime the door was open and having to sneak around the castle so that he could help the other students, was not a fond time.

"After Neville went into hiding, a bunch of the other students joined him in the Room." Dean threw out. "From all of the houses, even Slytherin. We figured that it was the safest place for us and that we could hide while fighting back. And then the battle started."

Seamus nodded his head. "And we would've all ended up dieing out there too if Neville hadn't rallied us then aswell. See, when we thought that Harry had been offed we all pretty much lost hope. Ready to give up the fight and head home to try and hide. Then all of a sudden, Neville was out there in the middle of it all! He practically told the Dark Lord to bugger off!"

"Is that so?" There was just the faintest bit of awe in Patty's voice as she turned to Neville, who was giving her a hesitant nod, and finished writing down what had been said. "And I'm assuming that is when you killed Nagini and Mister Potter finished off the Dark Lord?"

"Uhm, yeah..." Neville nodded, glanced around the room, and then was suddenly pushing himself out of his seat. For the first time, Patty noticed just how pale he had gotten over the course of their interview. "I'm really sorry, ma'am, but I have to go."

And, without any further things said, Neville had left the room leaving an awkward silence behind.

-0-0-0-0-

The next morning, still tired from the constant awakenings his nightmares gave him, Neville wandered down the stairs from his room and into the kitchen. Where he was promptly wrapped into a hug by his grandmother.

"I'm very proud of you Neville. Your parents would be proud of you too, you know that right?" She rasped out, tightening the grip she had on the boy.

And when he was finally able to pull himself away from the matronly woman, confusion clear on his face, the only thing he saw was the front page of the Daily Prophet as it was shoved into his face.

_**LONGBOTTOM; BRAVEHEART: PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN WIZARD, NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM, SHOWS THAT HE HAS JUST AS MUCH COURAGE AS ANY real reason the children of Hogwarts were ready to fight!**_


End file.
